So it's 24 hours till the prelims end and I want to call attention to some under-reviewed stories. We have a pretty even spread of reviews this time around (about 75% of the entries have 4 or 5 reviews, which is great!) but there are still a few that could stand to have another review. The following entries have 3 reviews as of now:

5. Wounds15. Pocketful of Time17. Knight36. Stasis39. One Day I Shall See a Bird46. Protracted Plight

I've already reviewed Pocketful of Time, Stasis, and Protracted Plight, so if I have time to review more today, I won't be able to review those (I mean, I could, but I've already reviewed them so it'd just be a comment of me saying the same thing I said before >.>).

This was a pretentious little experiment done on a short amount of time (because the contest times changed from noon my time to 6:00am, I guess? So I was in a bit of a panic).

This is supposed to be my super hilarious satire on feghoots. I don’t like feghoots. From a reader’s perspective, they’re clever and fun, but from my perspective (as a writer), they’re not all that clever. Once you come up with a decent pun-chline, it’s not all that hard to come up with the story that comes before it. So the structure you saw was the idea—it starts out innocently enough, then come a barrage of contrived feghoots, then a semi-meta commentary on feghoots, and then kind of a depressing ending.

In my head, the last part was comedic. I thought it would be pretty ridiculous (i.e. funny) for Jackie’s dying wish to be that her husband tell better jokes. But I guess that could’ve used some work >.>

The story’s message is summed up in this exchange here:

“Was it really all that clever, Rhett? Was it so smart?”

Rhett shrugged. “Did you laugh?”

Personally, I don’t think feghoots are all that funny, but hey, if they make people laugh, then who am I to knock ‘em.

>>Ratlab>>The_Letter_JI came up with two possible endings for this story. It originally had a happier ending, what I called “the Disney ending”, but at the last minute, I opted for the darker ending, since I thought it’d be funny for Jackie’s dying wish to be that her husband tell better jokes. Apparently I botched the execution of that one >.> I guess I could’ve made it more overdramatic to make it funnier. Probably could’ve played to the absurdity a little bit more. Ah well. Next time. ^^

It’s somewhat hard to “Think about how Police Squad actually works” when I’ve never seen Police Squad >.> I might give it a watch later, sure, but I just thought that was presumptive.

I’m not sure if I agree with you on the switch from serious to silly. I think what I’m learning in writing comedy is that people sometimes need jokes to serve as sort of “comedy cues”—indicators that what they’re reading is silly and not meant to be taken too seriously. The problem is, with how short the story had to be, the feghoots might come as less of a surprise if the first part wasn’t serious. Perhaps some light comedy would’ve been a good indicator, but it might’ve undermined the seriousness of a wound like Jackie’s… Hmm. I’ll have to think about this one.

You make a good point on the unrealistic-ness of Jackie’s wound. Her lack of anguish at such a deep gash is my fault. To be able to keep that, I could’ve made a joke out of that, probably, looking back on it, or made the wound less severe. The sudden oncoming of her death is also my fault. After switching to the darker ending, I forgot to change the rest.